1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to computer-implemented user interfaces, and in particular, to automatically generating continuous, staggered, baseline and ordinate dimension arrangements in a computer-aided drafting (CAD) program using an interactive, dynamic user interface.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer-aided design (CAD) systems have been widely used by designers, drafters, and engineers for a number of years. Most such systems use a graphical user interface (GUI) to display graphical images, such as photorealistic images, 2D or 3D models, schematic diagrams, etc.
Historically, CAD systems have used dimension lines to describe the geometry of objects within an image. Dimension lines are often used to describe the lengths of features or the distances between features. In prior art CAD systems, however, such dimension lines must be manually drawn by the user, which is tedious and time-consuming. Thus, there is a need in the art for improved techniques for generating dimension lines.